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We often hear stories these days about racism in machine learning algorithms. The subtlety in these stories is often missing. I've been reading about this recently and found this quote very telling:A wave of scholarship, triggered by the ProPublica report, illuminated
the statistical challenge at the heart of the argument: Given that the
underlying “base rate” of rearrest is higher for blacks than for whites, it
is mathematically inevitable that the burden of false positives will fall
more heavily on black defendants than on white ones. In other words,
given that more black defendants than white defendants actually do
have a high risk of reoffending, a “high risk” label that is correct 70% of
the time for both white and black defendants will still mis-label more
black than white defendants as high risk. A study titled “Inherent
Tradeoffs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores” proved
mathematically that when rearrest rates are not equal between races, a
well-calibrated tool like…

When I took a philosophy of mind class in high school, my professor proposed neural networks in computer science as a potential way to create consciousness. At the very least, it's a way to create high levels of intelligence. I didn't know exactly what a computerized neural network consisted of (I imagined it being built in hardware), and I still don't, really, but I'm curious: how similar is an artificial neural network to a biological one? Is it really a good replication?

An [Artificial Neural Network] consists of layers made up of interconnected neurons that receive a set of inputs and a set of weights. It then does some mathematical manipulation and outputs the results as a set of “activations” that are similar to synapses in biological neurons. While ANNs typically consist of hundreds to maybe thousands of neurons, the biological neural network of the human brain consists of billions.On the other hand:Biological…

I am a PhD student in economics at Stanford University. I am also an advocate and a follower of the effective altruism movement (www.effective-altruism.com). I was previously a Senior Research Analyst at the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University's Buffett Institute, where I studied the implementation of evidence-based policies in education and criminal justice. I am also the chair of the Animal Advocacy Research Fund Oversight Committee, which distributes roughly $300,000 annually to fund research on effective advocacy for animals.
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